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Since Richard Garriott has stated the NDA has been dropped and fully supports streaming/revealing the game as it is being developed, here are the latest updates related with Pre-Alpha Release 5 which starts Today (Thursday April 24) at 10am CST.

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 5 access for all backers at First Responder level and above, and those with Weekend Access Passes, begins this Thursday, April 24 at 10:30 AM Central Time. Release 5 access will end on Sunday, April 27 at 10:00 PM Central Time. Starting today, you can begin installing and patching (see instructions below), but login will not be enabled until Thursday morning.

We are happy to report that we were able to add a bunch of new content and features, while iterating on existing ones. However those deliverables didn’t quite end up matching our original goals. The sheer scope of getting skills working, while also responding to R4 feedback, made us radically shift focus for Release 5. Below are the original R5 deliverables, along with some extra notes and new deliverables in italics.

RELEASE 5, April 24 - 27, 2014:

Combat and Magic Skills: Finally you will no longer be confined to auto attack now that a wide array of combat and magic skills will be at your disposal. To let you test out a wide variety of these skills we will give you a bunch of skill points to allocate up and down as you wish. This allocation of points will automatically build your deck. Skills can be locked in your toolbar or left unlocked so they can be used in combos during combat.

35 (of 171) Skills: Here is the skill list for R5. Most of these are in a very simple first state so some of them are missing secondary effects, like movement (Trip, Tumble, etc.), speed (Ice Fist), etc.

Blades:

Thrust

Double Thrust ("double swipe")

Whirling Blades

Bludgeon:

Crushing Blow

Knockback

Heavy Armor:

Defensive Stance

Inner Strength

Light Armor:

Dodge

Tumble

Medium Armor

Glancing Blow

Trip

Polearms:

Push

Puncture

Ranged:

Aimed Shot

Disabling Shot

Piercing Shot

Shield:

Deflect

Shield Bash

Air:

Gust

Discharge

Lightning

Death:

Death Touch

Death Ray

Corpse Explosion

Earth:

Stone Fist

Root

Fire:

Flame Fist

Fireball

Life:

Heal Self

Healing Ray

Purify

Resurrection

Sun:

Light

Searing Ray

Water:

Ice Fist

Linear Lighting Model: As part of an ongoing effort to improve our visuals we have have switched from gamma lighting to linear lighting. This makes a lot of the details in our textures more visible but it has required us to touch every shader, texture, lighting setting, etc. in the game. Note that this is still a work in progress.

Add On Store Conversion (Website): Our backers now have the ability to convert their add on store purchases into credits that can either be applied to their pledge or used for other add on purchases (this feature available on website).

Journal: Results of conversations with the characters in our world will now appear in your Journal. This should aid questing tremendously without going as far as exclamation points overhead.

Crafting: We have increased the number of starting recipes to give players a wider array of recipes so that discovery can be more intuitive.

Compass: Navigating through our scenes can be quite challenging so we have added an on screen compass to help guide you around

Overland Map Polish: We continued iterating on the overland map. We added panning and zooming, animating objects (waves, windmills, etc.) and visibility of your party members

Combat Floaties: For those of you craving more information about what exactly is happening in combat we have added combat numbers that appear overhead during combat if you have Names Overhead toggled (via the N key)

Health Bars: Discerning status from the health dot alongside the name in R4 did not work for many of you so we have moved to a more traditional health bar

New Creatures:

Chest Mimic

Skeleton Archer

Satyr Mage

Satyr Archer

Traditional Combat Shortcut Bar: While we are still heavily committed to card style combat we quickly realized when playtesting this very early version that we don’t yet have enough supporting features (deck building, skill locking, etc.) in place to make it fun.

AFK Mode: When you type /afk or you are idle for a while your character will sit on the ground and [AFK] will be appended to the character name

New Vale Scenes: We shifted focus to more Vale scenes so we could create a more complete area of the game (replacing placeholder maps) versus proceeding to the main map.

Kingsport Sewers: An intense adventure area under Kingsport infested with the undead!

Standard Scenes: No more placeholders!

Road through the forest

Road through the grassland

Road through the hills

Grassland

Player Forest Village Variation 2: We used this plus Forest Village 1 to create a total of 10 Player Towns on the Vale

Player Housing: We have added 12 new player houses (4 Rustic, 6 Wood & Plaster, 2 Duke Castles) and as mentioned above we increased the number of locations that players can place houses to a total of 13. That raises the number of lots to around 600. With that change we have decided that for R5 we will no longer impose a time limit on ownership.

Death System: OooOoooOOOOooo! Death will now turn you into a ghost. Current thinking about the death system will be shared at a later date.

Main Continent Scenes: Finally players will get to see their first maps on the main continent including a city that is part of the story, adventuring areas, and a player town.

Interactive Areas: Don’t you wish you could move that chair in the tavern to have a better view of the front door? Public areas like taverns will now be flagged as interactive areas. This will allow more freedom in those spaces by allowing the moving but not taking of items.

AI Behaviors: NPCs will now start to have schedules and change behavior according to the time. This will include things like going around turning on the lights around town as the sun goes down. NPCs will also now react to players taking and breaking stuff so watch out when you try to steal that loaf of bread!

Books: Books will no longer just be decorative objects! Read lovely poems and stories written by our very own community in the game. Try to collect them all!

So now that it is clear what you can expect, we should also be as clear about what you should not expect:

Combat: Combat does not yet include random dealing, decks, combos, or advancement.

Performance: We have only done rudimentary optimizations and we do not yet have a full suite of performance fallbacks (LODs, etc.). This means the game will be quite slow on older machines, and due to memory usage, might be unstable in certain conditions (like densely decorated areas). With each release we will be doing further optimizations and adding to our fallbacks to improve performance.

Crafting: The crafting system is in the game as a framework, but is still missing some key components like repair, events, and enhancement. Skill checks are also not in yet, so results are always 100% successful. Long term, the percentage chance to make items will depend on a myriad of variables and can result in a variety of results including: making the item desired, making a simpler version of the item that will need to be enhanced, or making a damaged version of the item that needs repair.

Game Loop: Release 5 is a further iteration on our rudimentary game loop, but it is still very bare bones. Expect this to expand with each subsequent release but it won’t be truly complete until we hit Beta later this year

Advanced Player Housing: There are some advanced features for player housing, including waterfront properties, basements, home exterior decorations, and ceiling decorations that are not yet integrated. Expect to see these appear in future releases.

Visual Quality: Efforts to improve visual quality are ongoing. This started last release with increases to our art staff (especially in animation) and continued this release with the switch to linear lighting. Next steps include looking at different shaders we can composite (relief, detail, etc.), adding more triangles to meshes to catch light better (like the flat dungeon walls) , replacing animations that came with purchased assets (wolves, bears, etc.), revisiting avatar mesh proportions, skin shaders, hair, etc.

Thank you again for your continued support. This is truly the most amazing community we have ever worked with and we are proud to be on this journey with you.

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